The present disclosure relates generally to control of building automation devices and more specifically to the use of mobile wireless device data and indoor mobile device location to controlling smart building devices.
Traditionally people control the power state and operation of many household electronic devices. For example people turn on and off lights, manually adjust the volume and number of active speakers in multi-room wireless speaker systems and manually control climate controls. Manual operation of some devices has recently been replaced by automatic operation. For example, learning automated thermostats endeavor to learn when a building is historically occupied and adapt operation accordingly. While inferring building occupancy is a challenge, an arguably more difficult challenge is to automate devices within the building (e.g. lights and smart TV's) based on the changing indoor location of users (e.g. room-transitions). For example, while a mobile wireless device location (e.g. indicated by smartphone on a home LAN) can be a somewhat reliable indicator of occupancy of a building, the exact indoor location of the mobile wireless device has sporadic accuracy at indicating person location (e.g. people leave devices unattended). Thus, dynamically determining the relevance of mobile device indoor location in systems to automate buildings remains a challenge.